Dataset of the adoption of digital tools for research sharing among academics in African Varsities during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020

Ethics and consent

This study involved human subjects whose consent were sought in the cover letter of the questionnaire. The authors stated clearly to the respondents what the research involved and how the data will be handled. Respondents were made to understand that by completing the survey, they have consented to participate. Ethical approval was not required for this study according to the National Health Research Ethics Committee of Nigeria guidelines (NHREC).

Instrument development

The instrument used for data collection was designed by the researchers using information from a review of related literature. The instrument was designed in three sections. Section one included a lengthy cover letter detailing the purpose of the study, its duration, the planned delivery period, the nature of the responses/data needed and an ethical declaration stating how privacy and confidentiality would be maintained. The respondents were assured that all the information solicited was going to be used for the research and that no personal data was going to be revealed to anyone. The decision to participate was voluntary and respondents were further assured that collected data would be aggregated with all identifying information removed. At the end of the letter in section 1, respondents were informed that responding to the items in subsequent sections of the questionnaire, would indicate that they have consented to participate. Section 2 gathered demographic information from respondents, such as gender, age, qualifications, academic ranks, years of job experience, areas of research and countries of residence. The demographic information was gathered using a list of options for respondents to tick.

There was no potential bias, since the research was exploratory and the medium used for data collection was transparent, inclusive and open to all African universities. The researchers had no control of snowballing distribution to subsequent participants.

The third section was divided into six sub-sections. The first sub-section was a five-point rating system for a set of 20 online sites in which participants were supposed to indicate their willingness to use them for research sharing (See Table 1). The scale response options ranged from zero (No willingness) to five (very willing). Table 1 provides information about the extent of staff willingness to utilise digital tools for research dissemination using mean and standard deviation. The grand mean of 5839 was derived from finding the average of all the mean values for the 20 specific sites. This values indicates the overall extent respondents are willing to utilise digital tools for research dissemination. The respective mean values for the 20 digital tools indicates on average, the extent to which specific platforms are desired for utilisation. The second sub-section consisted of a closed-ended inquiry designed to ascertain academic personnel perceptions of conventional and contemporary approaches to research sharing. The third sub-section was a checklist of 20 websites on which respondents could check the ones they currently use for research sharing. We visualised the resources scholars are interested in using and identified the resources that are more likely to be utilised in the future (Figure 1). Table 2 provides information on the current state of academic staff utilisation of myriad digital tools in the dissemination of research.

The fourth sub-section was structured to assess respondents’ total number of scholarly publications (including journal articles, theses/dissertations, conference papers, book chapters, and books). Textboxes were provided for the respondents to write the total number of their published works. The fifth sub-section focused on the overall number of respondents’ academic publications available online (including those on the websites of publishers and those that are manually submitted to internet sites). The sixth sub-section was created to allow respondents to share their thoughts on the difficulties they experience while attempting to use online channels for research distribution. The bar chart in Figure 2 highlights the challenges limiting African scholars’ use of online for research dissemination. The various tools were chosen for each sub-section because of their effectiveness in collecting the required information.

Figure 2. Bar chart showing the challenges faced by academics in the utilization of digital tools for research dissemination in African Universities.

For face and content validity, the survey was reviewed by three instructional technology specialists and two psychometrists from the University of Calabar's Faculty of Education. The face and content validity were carried out to ensure that the contents and arrangements of the questions/items were reasonably clear, eliminating extraneous information and ambiguity.

A pretesting pilot study (Baker, 1994) was implemented in the study to try-out the instrument for data collection. In the pilot test a total of 60 academic staff from six countries in Africa were selected purposively from the AAU Telegram group to take part in the trial test. These 60 respondents were excluded from participating in the main study. The 60 participants took the survey once. Thereafter, 10 respondents of the 60 who participated in the pilot study were further selected to participate in a focus group discussion (FGD). The FGD, which took place on ZOOM videoconferencing, gave participants the opportunity to qualitatively discuss their experiences with the survey in terms of the length of the survey, time taken to complete it, how well they thought items measured their targeted variables and if there was an omission of anything important. Using the feedback from the focus group discussion, some online repositories were replaced. For instance, the ERIC and ProQuest databases were initially listed, but they were replaced with SSRN and Philpapers respectively, because the participants felt they cannot post documents to the previous two easily. The databases used for the replacements were suggested by the participants.

For reliability, the Cronbach alpha method was used to ascertain the degree of internal consistency of the instrument. The responses of the 60 participants in the pilot study was used. Reliability analysis was only performed for one variable (staff willingness to adopt digital tools) because it was the only variable that received continuous data. As a proof that the instrument was highly reliable, an alpha coefficient (α = 0.894) was obtained. This value was considered high as per the recommendations of other researchers (e.g., Cho & Kim, 2015; Hoekstra et al., 2019; Spiliotopoulou, 2009; Taber, 2018).

The link to the e-survey was shared on the Telegram forum of the Association of African Universities, which has 1,622 participants from various African countries and regions. Members of the group, who were university academic employees, were invited to complete the survey and post it on their institutions' internet-based forums. The researchers warned the participants intending to share the link to the questionnaire, to distribute it to only academics who meet the selection criteria. To be qualified as a respondent for the study, an academic staff must have obtained a doctorate degree and must have published an article in a peer reviewed journal. Through further dissemination of the questionnaire by the initially targeted participants, the researchers were able to get information from 1,977 respondents. All the respondents provided complete information to the questionnaire items; thus, there was no missing data.

The survey was open from July 2020 to January 2021, reflecting a seven-month data collection period. The accompanying data was imported, translated to an Excel file (.xlsx), reviewed, cleaned, and re-coded after the survey was closed (where necessary). The data obtained was deidentified in line with the privacy statement given to participants following the Safe Harbour method. All information pertaining to dates such as age and years of experience, were grouped into a range (e.g., 20 – 29 years). The data was cleaned in sections where respondents were given the freedom to provide short answers. Cleaning was done through fixing spelling errors, matching cases for responses and grouping responses. The survey received feedback from 1,977 academics in African universities. The survey was stopped not because of saturation but because no further response was obtained two months after the last response was obtained. At this point it became clear that responses were no longer forthcoming.

Underlying data

Mendeley: Electronic Cross-Sectional Data of Academic Staff Preparedness to Adopt Digital Tools for Research Sharing in African Varsities. http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/69k939yr4n.4 (Owan, ‘Electronic …’, 2021).

The project contains the following underlying data:

Extended data

This project contains the following extended data:

Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY 4.0).